Can we please stop hotlinking pics?

Everyone's favorite speed parts brand is now manufacturing small engines:

In reply to FJ40Jim :

Yeah, it looked cool, but was pretty much comprehensively terrible.  The French aircraft industry was below par from the '30s through Concorde, and even that was a joint venture.

Pretty, but not great:

Weird and terrible:

Hideous and terrible:

The best you can say about the various LeDuc ramjet designs is that no one was actually killed trying to fly them (they did fly).

But other than the Mirage series, so, so many French aircraft between 1935-1965 never made it past the prototype phase.

Pete. (l33t FS) said:

Twin tail single engine pusher prop?

There were others.  The Saab 21 was reasonably successful (used a German engine).  One issue with a pusher.  How do you bail out (without becoming finely chopped)?  Well, they develeped an ejections seat!

There was the Vultee XP-54, but the engine did not meet expectations.  This one shot you out the bottom for ejection (good luck at low altitude):

The XP-54 competed with two other rather cool looking pushers.  The Curtis Ascender (performance and stability issues):

And the rather pudgy Northrop Black Bullet (which had some notable stability issues).  You can certainly see Northrop's love for not have a tail in this design:

In reply to aircooled :

I know of pusher planes, at least a couple.  The neat thing about the Internet is that it existed long enough ago that some aviators from back then lived long enough to give first person accounts, online.  I love reading these guys' accounts of aviation at the time.

One person said that the pusher configuration in a certain plane (Bell YFM-1) made for pitch instability and a positive feedback loop for pitch when under power, so it required constant correction and diligence (must be tiring to fly) but the upside was that it was extremely stable with power off.

For bailing out, the flight manual said to feather the engines, and that they would feather in six seconds.

There's a lot more here if you are interested

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Thanks, yes that was interesting.  Lots of weird things being tried in aviation at that time.  The Aircuda was certainly one of them.  The electrical system certainly seemed to be a bit much, but having systems being electric instead of hydraulic did have it's advantages, especially in terms of battle damage.  A damaged part of a hydraulic system tended to take out all the hydraulics (loss of fluid).

Audi replicates a 1930s Supercar.

1925 RR Phantom ripoff?

Optical illusion carpentry.   Cool.

Wow. The Pettys posing with the Duke of Richmond at Goodwood.

J7W Shinden was recently featured in the final act of Godzilla Minus One.

It had test flights on the days Hiroshima and Nagasaki got nuked so that was as far as it got.

Punk'd by teenagers.

I love this.  My butt can't be wider than a Lincoln 430.